It is changing, but healthcare corporations are traded on the US stock exchanges, and more often, holding corporations that own numerous hospitals and provider networks. They've been very lucrative stocks up until Obama got elected, often paying more than 10% annual dividend, and the corporations that managed to thrive through acquisitions and mergers returned good profits for several decades in the United States. Some companies that remained in the private hands of wealthy individuals provided excellent spare-no-expense care, while the corporations that get sold off to shareholders usually end up tweaking the staffing and treatment models so that every illness scenario ends up returning the maximum profit for their shareholders, while producing competitive statistics.
It began as a conspiracy by advisers of Nixon, who asked not how Americans could all get affordable healthcare, but rather, asked how can corporations owned by people friendly to their party get the most money from wage earners, and control the money. They invented the system of preferred provider and health management organizations as a subscriber model, thus channeling fixed amounts each month from every worker's paycheck directly to corporate accounts, regardless of an individuals health problems or whether it was the most effective system. Even at the infancy of the industrial healthcare in America, our current situation was never a system evolved at random through free enterprise: it was planned and invented through legislation to ensure the money is funneled through holding corporations and distributed top-down rather than directly at the point of care (i.e. hospitals being run by their own earnings were targeted, bought out with leverage in the asset and turned into cash for investors).
The Nixon tapes have him discussing exactly how to screw over Americans with healthcare legislation. Avoiding giving Americans "free and easy" healthcare was his stated objective, in his backroom dealing.
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